Archives

Welcome to the archives of Elizabeth Esther's Blog.

NOTE: Please be patient with these archives! Because they are imported, some of the images may look a little wonky and some of the internal links may not work. I suggest that you use this handy little search bar to find what you're looking for.

It's easy to break your child's leg by having him/her ride down the playground slide on your lap: I used to do this all the time with my kids. Never knew how easy it was to hurt their little legs! It's actually safer to let them ride down the slide by themselves.
Regular, aerobic exercise makes you smarter: "Animals that exercised, whether or not they had any other enrichments in their cages, had healthier brains and performed significantly better on cognitive tests than the other mice. Animals that didn’t run, no matter how enriched their world was otherwise, did not improve their brainpower in the complex, lasting ways that Rhodes’s team was studying. “They loved the toys,” Rhodes says, and the mice rarely ventured into the empty, quieter portions of their cages. But unless they also exercised, they did not become smarter.

The evolution of the runner's high: this is the reason I run. I feel SO GOOD afterwards. All those natural endocannabinoids flooding my system after a long, hard run keep me coming back for more--even though I find the actual running itself tedious and painful. I've discovered I have to create a story for myself while I'm running: my latest one is that I'm running away from zombies. I also distract my mind by talking to a running partner. I don't have an iPod so I haven't used music yet. But I'm thinking I need to do that, too.

Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey have made female submission the new erotica: "it’s natural to wonder why women are thronging to the story of an innocent who jumps into the arms of a Seattle sadist with a “Red Room of Pain” full of chains, clamps, whips, canes, flogs and cuffs, falling in love to the soundtrack of the Police’s “King of Pain.” Yeah, I'm wondering about that, too. Ick. Am I the only one who isn't titillated by the sexual subjugation of women? Call me a prude, but I don't want a pornified marriage.

Hookup culture debases women: Bill Bennett provides an interesting insight into why Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey are so popular. "If this is progress for women, what would regression look like?"